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Telling the world about the supreme beauty embraced in “Oribe-gonomi”

Furuta Oribe started life with the birth name Furuta Shigenari. He was one of the seven disciples of Rikyu and served as tea master to the warlords Nobunaga and Hideyoshi as well as the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Such were his qualities, that after Rikyu’s death, he was garnered with the accolade: “first under heaven”.
Oribe is known for his daring, avant-garde shapes and motifs for tea bowls at the Mino potteries (Mino-yaki), which were said to express a sense of zany humor (he-uge-mono, in Japanese).
The museum was opened in 2014, to mark the 400th anniversary of Oribe’s death, with the collection of some 500 pieces having been collected over many years by the museum director, Miyashita Harumasa, who has long been enthralled by Oribe’s unique aesthetic values　Unleashing his creative skills in various pottery wares, such as Karatsu, Mino (Shino, Oribe), Bizen and Iga, as well as tea ceremony utensils, architecture and landscape gardening, Oribe dominated aesthetics so totally that his artistic style became an artistic term: “Oribe-gonomi”. And, this museum works to send Oribe’s message of “supreme beauty” out across Japan and across the globe through planned exhibitions held twice a year, in which core exhibits come from the museum director’s collection. To greet visitors to Oribe’s world, the small garden next to the museum’s entrance is adorned with an Oribe garden lantern and a replica stone wash basin.